of Candia and its environs. The countryside was the setting for the winepress fiasco, while the highway robbery of the wine merchants took place in the borgo, beyond the walls of the town. Everyday moneylending, buying and selling of goods, and writing up of contracts likely took place in many locations—workshops and warehouses, pawnshops and open-air stalls, and inside homes. Notarial contracts from Candia do not share nearly as much data as those from other Mediterranean cities; they do not identify where they were signed. But Jewish-Christian encounters were not constrained in location. When the Inquisition questioned Catacalo, they did not seem to mind that he had been in a Jewish home; rather, it was the sheer length of time he had been inside the wise Jew’s home—fifteen days—that provoked suspicion. Moreover, Jews and Christians shared much of the spatial infrastructure of daily life, even sharing communal ovens until the mid-sixteenth century, when Elia Capsali built a bakehouse on his own property. But even after that moment, we do not know if all Jews shifted their baking to the specifically kosher ovens.64
To be sure, the story of Jewish residential life in Candia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is one of increasing restrictions. The Jewish Quarter as a singular, defined space became increasingly reified and limited over that period, a trend paralleled in many other locations across Christendom.65 Until the fourteenth century, Jews lived both in the area that became known as the Judaica and in a particular area of the suburban borgo.66 Even the very boundaries, the streets that constituted the Judaica, were fluid for a century. By 1334, however, when for the first time Jews were ordered to own and rent homes only inside the Judaica, the boundary lines had become clearly defined. A further order compelling Jews to live exclusively within these streets was also passed in 1350, perhaps part of the pan-European response to the Black Death.67 In the early 1390s, the ducal administration ordered that some homes along the southern boundary of the Judaica, directly across the street from Christian homes, had to be walled off.68 The east side of the Judaica was similarly bricked up in 1450, following complaints by the nearby Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr.69 By the mid-1450s, then, the Judaica was no longer simply a neighborhood where Jews chose to settle together but a walled-in, discrete quarter whose inhabitants no longer lived there solely by choice.
Yet the narrative involves more than increasing segregation or a residential division of Jews and Christians caused by a Venetian change in policy. Segregation was not imposed solely by the Christian state but instead co-opted as an ideal by the leadership of the Jewish community itself. Moreover, despite this ideal found in both Jewish and Christian discourses, the reality for Jews and Christians was that that encounter took place both inside and outside of the Jewish Quarter, even as that space became increasingly identified as “Jewish.”
Co-opting the Narrative: Jewish Delineation of Jewish Space
Despite Venice’s accruing policies limiting Jewish residence, the Jewish community leadership did not chafe very much against the strictures. To the contrary, we see that the physical neighborhood of the Jewish Quarter had long been a comfortably limited area for the community’s leaders—at least since the mid-fourteenth century, when Rabbi Tzedakah revised the rhyming ordinances of 1228 into a more legalistic prose version. Rabbi Tzedakah’s text mandates that, for the sake of maintaining the sanctity of Sabbath and prayers, no Jew may leave the kahal (read: Jewish Quarter) until morning services are over.70 Here, the Jewish leadership co-opted the spatial limitations that had ostensibly been imposed on the community and reinterpreted them as helping construct a protective neighborhood. A typical example of the intermeshing of imposed segregation and self-segregation, it tells us much about the way the Jewish elite, at least, had long thought of their micro-city.71
There can be no doubt that the leadership of the ethnoreligious communities of Candia emphasized and idealized segregation. As David Jacoby has written, “Both Jewish and Venetian ordinances envisaged the corrosive effects of social contacts and promiscuity between Jews and Christians and the benefits of the Jewish segregation.”72 While Venetian legislation certainly aimed to separate Jewish and Christian residence, Jewish segregation was, at least in part, self-segregation. Per Jacoby, Jews kept to themselves “by choice. Their lifestyle, customs, culture, social cohesion and residential segregation emphasized their identity as a distinct ethnic and religious group.”73 For Capsali and his ilk, then, the closed-in walls of the kahal felt comfortably familiar and protective. Moreover, instead of considering the Judaica a limiting factor, a close reading of Taqqanot Qandiya suggests that its authors saw the increasingly defined and confined space of the Judaica as a benefit to the leadership itself. It enabled them to simultaneously define the boundaries of their power, assert control over their communities, and perhaps even boost morale by assuring their flocks that they did indeed have a place to be among themselves.
The authors of Taqqanot Qandiya certainly saw and depicted the Jewish Quarter of Candia as an insider space. As in the example above, they regularly use the term kahal (or similar, kehillah), community, not only in reference to the people but as a name for the physical Jewish Quarter. The semantic field often seems to conflate the two, people and place. The leadership decries Jewish prostitutes dwelling in residences located “in our community [be-kehillateinu].”74 Even more explicitly, in the ordinances forbidding Jews from leaving the confines of the Judaica during Sabbath and holiday prayer services mentioned above, we read: “From today forward, no one among the people of our community [me-anshei kehillateinu] will be permitted to leave the community [kahal; read: Jewish Quarter] on Sabbaths, the New Months, or holidays, without a compelling reason, until the exit from the morning synagogue service.”75 A revision of this ordinance passed by the reforming synod of 1363 makes the conflation more specific and more concrete: “From this day forward no Jew among the people of our community [me-anshei kehillateinu] will be permitted to leave from the street of the community [rehov hakahal] during the morning services during the time that the synagogue is open for prayer.”76 For the Jewish leadership, the space of the Jewish Quarter was one and the same with the confines of the Jewish community.
But the conflated language of the kahal as a human and spatial designation not only functioned as a vocabulary of inclusion, marking everyone inside as a member of the community. It could also help draw the barriers of exclusion and difference. In a list of all the taqqanot passed in 1363, the Sabbath ordinance is identified with this extended title: “That no Jew may exit from the community [min hakahal] into the alley of the Gentiles [le-mevo’i hagoyim] on Sabbaths and holidays at the time that the congregation [tzibbur] is praying, and all Jews are obligated to come to the synagogue to be as a single association [agudah] in their prayers.”77 The Jewish space of the kahal sharply and definitively contrasts with Christian space in this schema. One must exit, making a formal transition, from one to the other. Although it is unclear whether this alley refers to a specific street or a general category of streets, the choice of contrasting words is suggestive: the language of the kahal evokes openness, while the alley calls to mind narrow confinement.
The contrast between Jewish space and the Christian space beyond the walls appears most explicit when the authors of an ordinance mention the vesper bells “which are rung by the friars [lit. the brothers], the priests who are on the border of the kahal.”78 The Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr—and its human embodiments of Christianity’s conversion ethic—stood to the east of the Judaica. It formed not only a physical boundary between the Jewish Quarter and the Christian world outside but also a conceptual boundary indicating where the kahal (qua persons and place) ended.
Even as the Jewish leadership saw the Judaica as a definitively Jewish space, they also recognized that they were not alone inside. The boundaries were not impermeable, nor did they need to be. Even the Dominican monastery, which starkly delineated the border of the Judaica, was not purely external to the Jewish space. The vesper bells could be easily heard within. In fact, the taqqanah that mentions these bells demanded that Jews utilize the sound of their ringing as a sign to cease working,
